Mathematics

Major mathematical news in 1998 included the claim that a nearly 400-year-old conjecture finally had been proved. In 1611 the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler concluded that the manner in which grocers commonly stack oranges--in a square-based pyramid with each layer of oranges sitting in a square grid centred above the holes in the layer below--gives the densest way to pack spheres in infinite space. (Packing with oranges in each layer in a hexagonal grid is equally dense.) Thomas Hales of the University of Michigan, after 10 years of work, announced a proof of the conjecture. Nearly every aspect of the proof relied on computer support and verification, and supporting the 250-page written proof were three gigabytes of computer files. Mathematicians would need time to determine if the proof was complete and correct.

Kepler was set on the sphere-packing problem by correspondence with Thomas Harriot, an English mathematician and astronomer and an assistant to Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh wanted a quick way to determine the number of cannonballs in a pile with a base of any shape. Harriot prepared tables for Raleigh and wrote to Kepler about the problem in connection with their discussion of atomism. In 1831 the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss showed that face-centred cubic packing, as the orange packing is known to mathematicians, could not be less dense than other lattice packings, those in which the centres of the spheres lie on a regular grid. Some nonlattice packings, however, are almost as efficient, and in some higher dimensions the densest packings known are nonlattice packings. It was thus possible that a denser nonlattice packing might exist for three dimensions.

Hales’s work built on that of the Hungarian mathematician Laszlo Fejes-Toth, who in 1953 reduced the task of settling the conjecture to that of solving an enormous calculation. Hales formulated an equation in 150 variables that described every conceivable regular arrangement of spheres. This equation derived from a mathematical decomposition of the star-shaped spaces (decomposition stars) between the spheres. Hales had a computer classify the decomposition stars into 5,000 different types. Although each type required the solving of a separate optimization problem, linear programming methods allowed the 5,000 to be reduced to fewer than 100, which were then done individually by computer. The proof involved the solving of more than 100,000 linear programming problems that each included 100-200 variables and 1,000-2,000 constraints.

The analogue of the Kepler problem in two dimensions is the task of packing circular disks of equal radius as densely as possible. The hexagonal arrangement in which each disk is surrounded by six others--a lattice packing--was shown by Gauss to be the densest packing. For dimensions higher than three, it was not known if the densest lattice packings are the densest packings.

The mathematics of sphere packing is directly related to issues of reliable data transmission, including data compression and error-correcting codes, in such applications as product bar coding, signals from spacecraft, and music encoded on compact discs. Code words can be considered to correspond to points in a space whose dimension is the common length of a code word. The "Hamming distance" (named for pioneer coding theorist Richard Hamming) between any two given words, which can be code words or words to which they can become distorted by errors in transmission, is the number of positions in which the words differ. Around each code-word point, a sphere of radius r includes all words that differ in at most r places from the code word; these words are the distortions of the code word that would be corrected to the code word by the error-correcting process. The error-detecting and error-correcting capabilities of a code depend on how large r can be without spheres of different code words becoming overlapped; in the case of an overlap, one would know that an error had occurred but not to which code word to correct it.

An analogy is the task of packing into a box of fixed size a fixed number of same-size glass ornaments (the total number of code words) wrapped in padding, with the requirement that each ornament be padded as thickly as possible. This, in turn, means that the padded ornaments must be packed as closely as possible. Thus, efficient codes and dense packings of spheres (the padded ornaments) go hand in hand. The longer the code words are, the greater is the dimension of the space and the farther apart code words can be, which makes for greater error-detection and error-correction capability. Longer code words, however, are less efficient to transmit. A longer code word corresponds to using a bigger box to ship the same number of ornaments.

It remained to be seen whether Hales’s result or the methods he used would lead to advances in coding theory. Mathematicians generally were skeptical of the value of proofs that relied heavily on computer verification of individual cases without offering new insights into the surrounding mathematical landscape. Nevertheless, Hales’s proof, if recognized as correct, could inspire renewed efforts toward a simpler and more insightful proof.

Chemistry

Physical Chemistry

Hydrogen is the lightest, simplest, and most plentiful chemical element. Under ordinary conditions it behaves as an electrical insulator. Theory predicts that hydrogen will undergo a transition to a metal with superconducting properties if it is subjected to extreme pressures. Until 1998, attempts to create metallic hydrogen in the laboratory had failed. Those efforts included experiments making use of diamond anvil cells that compressed hydrogen to 340 GPa (gigapascals) at room temperature, about 3.4 million times atmospheric pressure. Some theorists predicted that such pressures, which approach those at Earth’s centre, should be high enough for the insulator-metal transition to occur.

Robert C. Cauble and associates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., and the University of British Columbia reported the first experimental evidence for the long-awaited transition. They used a powerful laser beam to compress a sample of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, to 300 GPa. The laser simultaneously heated the deuterium to 40,000 K (about 70,000° F). In the experiments the sample began to show signs of becoming a metal at pressures as low as 50 GPa, as indicated by increases in its compressibility and reflectivity. Both characteristics are directly related to a substance’s electrical conductivity. Cauble’s group chose deuterium because it is easier to compress than hydrogen, but they expected that hydrogen would behave in the same way. Confirmation of the theory would do more than provide new insights into the fundamental nature of matter. It would lend support to an idea, proposed by astronomers, that giant gas planets like Saturn and Jupiter have cores composed of metallic hydrogen created under tremendous pressure.

Chemists long had sought methods for glimpsing the intermediate products that form and disappear in a split second as ultrafast chemical reactions proceed. These elusive reaction intermediates can provide important insights for making reactions proceed in a more direct, efficient, or productive fashion. A. Welford Castleman, Jr., and associates of Pennsylvania State University reported development of a new method to "freeze" chemical reactions on a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) time scale. Their technique involved use of a phenomenon termed a Coulomb explosion to arrest a reaction and detect intermediates. A Coulomb explosion occurs when a particle, such as a molecule, has acquired many positive or negative electric charges. The like charges produce tremendous repulsive forces that tear the particle apart. A Coulomb explosion that occurs during a chemical reaction instantly halts the reaction. Fragments left behind provide direct evidence of the intermediates that existed in the split second before the explosion.

Castleman’s group used a pulse from a powerful laser to ionize particles, and so trigger a Coulomb explosion, in a reaction involving the dimer of 7-azaindole. (A dimer is a molecule formed of two identical simpler molecules, called monomers.) When the dimer is excited by light energy, protons (hydrogen ions) transfer from one monomer to another in the system, allowing two dimers to combine into a four-monomer molecule, or tautomer. The explosion froze this reaction, which allowed Castleman’s group to determine exactly how the proton transfer occurs.

In the 1980s physicists developed laser and magnetic techniques for trapping individual atoms at ultracold temperatures, which allowed their properties to be studied in detail never before possible. At room temperature the atoms and molecules in air move at speeds of about 4,000 km/h (2,500 mph), which makes observation difficult. Intense chilling, however, slows atomic and molecular motion enough for detailed study. Specially directed laser pulses reduce the motion of atoms, sapping their energy and creating a cooling effect. The slowed atoms then are confined in a magnetic field. Chemists have wondered for years whether laser cooling techniques could be extended to molecules and thus provide an opportunity to trap and study molecular characteristics in greater detail.

John M. Doyle and associates at Harvard University reported a new procedure for confining atoms and molecules without laser cooling. In their experiments the researchers focused a laser on solid calcium hydride, liberating calcium monohydride molecules. They chilled the molecules with cryogenically cooled helium, reducing their molecular motion, and then confined the molecules in a magnetic trap. The technique could have important implications for chemical science, leading to new insights into molecular interactions and other processes.

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